Threat Intelligence Blog

Weekly Threat Intelligence Brief: February 22, 2017

This weekly brief highlights the latest threat intelligence news to provide insight into the latest threats to various industries.

Energy

“An overwhelming majority (89%) of power and utility executives say their cybersecurity function does not fully meet their organization’s needs, according to the EY Global Information Security Survey 2016-17.

That number continues to rise compared with last year (86% in 2015) as companies struggle to manage increased risk from growth in digital and connected devices.

[…]

Fifty-eight percent of survey respondents acknowledge they have recently experienced a significant cybersecurity incident. Employees were overwhelmingly considered to be the biggest source of attack with 84% of respondents listing careless employee actions as a threat. The majority (58%) of executives rated security awareness and training as a high priority.”

Insurance/Healthcare

“February 15, 2017 – Most of the 2016 healthcare data breaches stemmed from hackers, with an overall increase in healthcare cybersecurity attacks of that kind rising 320 percent, according to recent research from Redspin.

Specifically, 81 percent of the breached records last year came from hacking attacks, the Breach Report 2016: Protected Health Information (PHI) found. There were also a total of 325 large-scale PHI data breaches, compromising 16,612,985 individual patient records.

Auxilio acquired Redspin in 2015, and then acquired CynergisTek earlier this year. Redspin then became part of Cynergistek’s portfolio. ”

Law Enforcement

“The Department of Homeland Security said it has launched a multi-faceted attempt to defend the nation’s computer networks from hackers in light of witnessing a dramatic surge recently with respect to the number of crippling cyberattacks being waged against internet infrastructure.

The DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate on Thursday said its cybersecurity division has set its sights on safeguarding the internet against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, an elementary but effective tactic used by hackers to overload a network with illegitimate web traffic to render it useless.

An unprecedented DDoS attack waged in October 2016 targeted Dyn, an internet performance company that runs a popular domain name system that effectively functions as an online directory. Millions of computer users across North American and Europe suffered internet disruptions due to the assault, the likes of which was waged by infecting millions of common, “Internet of Things” start devices with a strain of malicious software known as Mirai.”